The 1892 Columbian Parade, Washington Square
1895
Henry Pember Smith (1854 -1907)
Oil on canvas, 36 X48
Signed lower right: Henry Smith 95
Gift of the Rhinelander Real Estate Company, 91.5

 

The reputation of Henry Pember Smith, a self-taught painter and member of the American Water Color Society, hinged on his New England and Mediterranean landscapes.¹ This detailed urban scene, a departure from Smith's preferred subjects and medium, represents one of the gala public events held in New York City to mark the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus' landfall in the Americas.

Based on the march route indicated here, Smith's painting probably documents the School and College Parade on October 10, 1892, which inaugurated the city's various Columbian pageants.² Celebratory activities occupied much of the week of October 9 -15, 1892. On October 11, New Yorkers witnessed a naval spectacle that sailed from Gravesend Bay up the Hudson River to 126th Street, followed by an evening parade of local Catholic societies. Dedication ceremonies for the new Columbus Monument at 59th Street and Eighth Avenue were scheduled for the next day, as was a "grand military procession" uniting soldiers, sailors, police, and firemen in an eight-hour parade that served as the holiday's climax.

The parade shown here, composed of company units drawn from public, military, and Catholic schools, divided twenty-five thousand male students into twenty official regiments, each "commanded" by a grammar school principal.³ Augmenting the ranks were representatives from local colleges and graduate schools, assembled into a "College Division." Marching bands were interspersed throughout the file. Starting on Fifth Avenue at a point slightly north of a triumphal arch at 57th Street that functioned as one of the centerpieces for the Quadricentennial observances, the marchers flowed south toward Greenwich Village into Washington Square, eventually disbanding at Fourth Street. Fireworks and gun salutes from the Brooklyn Bridge concluded the day.

Smith has captured the participants, with a phalanx of uniformed police in the lead, advancing toward Washington Square Park, nearing a reviewing stand topped by a striped canopy outside the venerable Rhinelander Mansion at 14 Washington Square North -one of four Rhinelander properties along the park's prestigious northern border. The commodious seating area for invited guests had been erected for the Columbian Week proceedings by philanthropist William Rhinelander Stewart.⁴ Appropriately festooned with American flags and bunting, the Rhinelander townhouse on the west row of Washington Square North had been designed by Richard Upjohn in 1839 as a home for William C. and Mary Rogers Rhinelander (whose marriage had combined two inheritances, from real estate and sugar refinery interests, into one of nineteenth-century New York's major family fortunes). Occupied by descendants continuously until 1914, the building was owned by Serena and Julia Rhinelander when the Columbian parade tramped past it. Their nephew, fellow heir, and lawyer William Rhinelander Stewart lived at number 17, a neighboring family-owned townhouse. Active in many causes and institutions dear to Greenwich Village's patrician community, Stewart had initiated the campaign to replace the square's temporary Washington Memorial Arch with a permanent marble version, the bulk of which was in position by Columbus Day 1892. The completion of that project in 1895 solidified Stewart's local renown as the "Father of the Arch."

Smith's painting records both the festivity and the formality that attracted nearly one million people to the city's Columbian observances. "New York was a garb of bridal richness," remarked the New-York Tribune; "her houses were veiled with red, white, blue, yellow and green. Her streets were vistas of many colored delights."⁵ The School and College Parade, like New York's other Quadricentennial processions, was conducted with full military rigor, enlisting marshals, commandants, and adjutant generals to supervise this impressive show of student patriots. Twelve-year-old Henry Noble MacCracken, a son of the chancellor of New York University, marched with his schoolmates, wearing "Columbus buttons" and "red, white and blue ribbon over one shoulder." "We kept right on down Fifth Avenue," he recalled in his later autobiography. "When we got down to Washington Arch, there was papa and mama waving a flag."⁶

While dignitaries and the paying public could survey Washington Square's Columbian events from several elevated, tented grandstands, the general throng was left to jostle for viewing space at street level. The sun-dappled scene conveyed by Smith, however, suggests little discomfort among those assembled. Nor has the police presence deterred a girl (spotted in the left foreground) from approaching an unaware officer to pick his pocket.

Notes:

  1  Smith exhibited landscapes at the National Academy of Design almost continuously between 1877 and 1899, with various addresses listed on West 11th Street, Union Square, and Broadway. Other connections to the local art community included memberships in the Salmagundi Club and the Artists' Fund Society. For clippings and dictionary entries related to Smith, see Museum Archives.

  2  When this painting first entered the Museum as a long-term loan in 1942, it was identified as the 1892 Columbian Military Parade. However, the downtown direction of the parade recorded by Smith, confirmed by the position of the marchers approaching Washington Square Park, supports a correction to the School and College Parade of October 10, 1892. That parade went south down Fifth Avenue, disbanding in Greenwich Village. See "Young America Leads Off, First of the Great Parades of Columbus Week," New York Times, October 11, 1892. The more lavish Military Procession on October 12 flowed north on a route starting at the Battery, moving up Broadway, across 4th Street, and around Washington Square, passing north up Fifth Avenue, then filing through another temporary arch at 57th Street and moving north again to the newly dedicated Columbus Monument at what is now Columbus Circle. For a discussion of the complex events that were packaged as the Columbian Celebration, see Brooks McNamara, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations in New York, 1788 -1909 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 156 -157.

  3  The New York Times of October 11, 1892, noted the irony of the procession's inclusion of "Indian boys and girls from the Government school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania . . . Why the North American Indian should make merry over the anniversary of the landing of Columbus in America was hard to tell."

  4  Scion of two of New York's oldest and most prominent families (the Rhinelanders and the Lispenard-Stewarts), William Rhinelander Stewart (b. 1852) was a lawyer who spent most of his professional time advising on the management of his family's inherited estate holdings, including the powerful Rhinelander Real Estate Company, whence the Museum acquired Smith's painting in a loan that was subsequently converted into a gift. A trustee of Greenwich Savings Bank, a vestryman of Grace Church, and treasurer of the Washington Square Arch Committee, Stewart also served as a committee chairman of New York State's Committee on Reformatories and on Schools for the Deaf. His interest in such schools may explain a connection between the Columbian School and College Parade, represented in this painting, and Stewart as benefactor of some of the organizations that participated in the procession.

  5  "Columbian Parade -Conceded to Be the Grandest in the History of the Metropolis," New-York Daily Tribune, October 13, 1892.

  6  Henry Noble MacCracken, The Family on Gramercy Park, quoted in New York Chronicle (Fall 1989): 22 -23. MacCracken's parents probably witnessed their son's parade from Stewart's grandstand or another stand assembled by New York University in Washington Square. The young MacCracken went on to become president of Vassar College.